News

We aim to provide a
comprehensive summary of important news in the area of constraint programming.
The newsletter is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October.
Please email the relevant editor with any news, event, report or profile you
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* Association for Constraint Programming (ACP)

ACP EC news: October 1st to December
31th, 2006

-----------------------------------------------

This is a short summary of the
activities of the ACP EC during the months October-December 2006.

*
Appointment for all the EC charges.

All the charges
of the ACP (president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer and conference
coordinator) were reconsidered. After an internal election process, with the
following candidates:

-President:
Francesca Rossi, Jean-Charles Régin

-Vice-president:
Peter van Beek,
Frédéric
Benhamou

-Secretary:
Pedro Meseguer

-Treasurer:
Christian Bessiere

-Conference
coordinator: Barry O'Sullivan

the following people were elected:

-President:
Francesca Rossi

-Vice-president:
Peter van Beek

-Secretary:
Pedro Meseguer

-Treasurer:
Christian Bessiere

-Conference
coordinator: Barry O'Sullivan

These
charges will be held for one year (until CP 2007).

* Discussion
on possible changes in the ACP rules.

The EC is
considering the possibility to improve some of the ACP rules. To do this, a
subcommittee of the EC, chaired by Michael Trick, is analyzing many other
associations and is discussing possible improvements of the current set of ACP
rules. The whole ACP EC will then decide on the changes, which will apply
within a year.

* Feedback
on Doctoral Program.

A procedure has been
activated to get feedback from students that have participated in the Doctoral
Program of previous conferences. This information will be used to improve the
structure of the DP in future CP conferences.

* Decision
for 2007 CP summer school.

The call for
bids for the CP 2007 summer school was sent out soon after CP 2006, and it has
been closed on December 20. The ACP EC decided to accept the bid prepared by
Javier Larrosa and Pedro Meseguer, who will organize the 2007 CP Summer School
in
Spain
(in some place by
the coast near
Barcelona)
in June 2007. It will be a general school, with lectures on various aspects of
CP. More details will be posted soon.

Please visit
the website of the Association, http://www.a4cp.org/.
It explains the purpose of the ACP and its rules, and it provides links to the ACP EC elections, the Constraints Journal, the CP conferences, the CP summer school,
the Yahoo! discussion group on
constraints, and other activities of the ACP.

* We
are saddened to pass on news that Marco
Cadoli (http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~cadoli ) has passed away on November 21, 2006, after a long battle with cancer. He
leaves his beloved wife Laura and two small sons Andrea and Riccardo. Marco
made many contributions to research in constraints, satisfiability, knowledge
representation and databases. An international symposium in
Rome is being planned in his honour, just
before the next Italian AI Conference.

*
4C News

We are
pleased to announce that Alan Holland and Roberto Rossi, both of the Cork
Constraint Computation Centre, are two of the four short-listed candidates for
the Irish Software Association Student Medal for Commercially Viable Software
2006.

"The
Irish Software Association (ISA) Student of the Year medal will be made to the
post graduate student, who in the opinion of the judges has developed the most
innovative and commercially viable software product. This also provides an
opportunity to foster closer links between the software industry and Irish 3rd
level institutions.

This student
medal will be presented at the ISA Annual Software Industry Awards ceremony to
be held in the Burlington Hotel,
Dublin
4on the 10th November 2006."

Alan Holland
has received support from
Enterprise
Ireland
and Science Foundation
Ireland
.
Roberto Rossi has received support from Science Foundation
Ireland
through the Centre for
Telecommunications Value-Chain Research.

RISC-Linz, a
research institute at the Johannes Kepler University, Austria, offers opportunities to
researchers to obtain access to its infrastructure and facilities. Access is
free of charge and is provided through the project SCIEnce within the 6th
Framework Programme of the European Commission.

What we
offer

=============

Free access to the infrastructure, facilities, and expertise of a
world-leading center in symbolic computation.

Scientific, technical, administrative, and logistic support,
including travel and living expenses.

Who can
benefit

===============

Students and Researchers from various fields of sciences who use or
would like to use symbolic computation in their work.

For more
information and the application procedure please visit the program web page:

This award
honors an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in any area of automated planning and
scheduling. It will be given during ICAPS conferences.

PhD
dissertations that were completed and filed in 2005 or 2006 may be considered
for the next ICAPS07 award.

The
recipient of the 2007 award will receive a certificate, 500 US$ and a complementary
registration to the ICAPS07 conference.

The award
committee is requesting nominations of candidate PhDs.

The
nomination material should include the following :

-a CV of the
candidate with a complete list of publications,

-a copy of the
dissertation,

-a
nomination letter by the PhD advisor,

-two additional recommendation letters, or a copy of the
request for such letters.

Nominations
should be submitted in electronic form (preferably as a single pdf file or the url of such a file) to the ICAPS Award Committee chair:
Malik.Ghallab@laas.fr

Submission deadline : January 31st 2007.

The decision
will be notified by June 1st, 2007

*
Post your articles in CoRR!

by Krzysztof R. Apt

By means of
this short note I would like to call your attention/remind you of the e-Print archive, http://arXiv.org/ that started in 1991 as Los
Alamos National Laboratory e-Print archive (LANL) by the physicist Paul
Ginsparg. At present ArXiv contains more than 392,000 e-prints in Physics,
Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology. It is a fully automated
electronic archive and distribution server for research papers.

Summary : Constraint Programming is a
powerful tool for solving problems in AI and for Decision Support Systems. Two aspects are important: the modelling
language has to be expressive and the solver efficient.

Our
contributions tackle these two problems. We propose automatic solver construction techniques based on Machine
Learning for an arbitrary constraint defined in extension. These techniques
yield different filtering levels. When a
concept known only by a subset of positive and negative examples has to be used
as a constraint in a problem, we propose a technique to learn the constraint
and derive from this step a propagator.

Then, we
have studied the problem of quantified constraints which is able to model
uncertainty or competition against an opponent. We have proposed and built a solver for an extended language which is
able to express naturally quantified problems and at the same time to solve
them faster.

The research
area of this thesis is related to (cooperative) constraint solving –(C)CS. Classical CS methods yield generally poor performances
on large scale problems. New methods are oriented towards synergetic
behaviours. The literature brings numerous examples of successes associated to
the combination (in the large sense) of CS techniques. Solver cooperation -
SC- is related to these
problematics. While ad-hoc combination methods are widespread, works on
frameworks which enhance the definition and reuse of these assemblies are
clearly more sporadic. SC is at the crossway of various problematics including
software components or coordination; moreover, it is also close to fields like
web services and distributed computing tools, which enhance the modularity, the
genericity and the efficiency of related frameworks. The work of this thesis
first tries to clarify the different approaches while extracting the shared
concepts. We then try to integrate them in an homogeneous framework, where on
the one hand, we try to promote reusability, while on the other,
common interactions are reproducable. Besides this conceptual work at the
so-called models level, we will present various propositions related to
architecture and domain specific language implementations. The latter mainly
benefit from the experience acquired in the European project coconut, which
aimed at improving the performances of the best known solving methods for
continuous guaranteed global optimisation problems using CCS.

Hybridization
of incomplete and constraint programming techniques for solving Constraint
Satisfaction Problems is generally restricted to some kind of master-slave combinations
for specifc classes of problems. In this PhD thesis, we are concerned with the
design of a hybrid resolution framework based on K.R. Apt's chaotic iterations.
In this framework, basic resolution processes are abstracted by functions over
an ordered structure. This allows us to consider the different resolution
agents at a same level and to study more precisely various strategies for
hybridization of local

search,
genetic algorithms and constraint propagation. Hybrid resolution can be
achieved as the computation of a fixed point of some specific reduction
functions. Our framework opens up new and finer possibilities for
hybridization/combination strategies. Our prototype implementation gave experimental
results showing the interest of the model to design such hybridizations.

Submissions
and questions regarding this
special issue of the Constraint Letters
Journal may be sent electronically to Marc van Dongen (dongen@cs.ucc.ie) or by regular mail to the following address:

Marc van
Dongen

Computer
Science Department

University
College
Cork

Western Road

Cork

Ireland

Paper
submission deadline: March 31, 2007

Acceptance
notification: June 30, 2007

Software

-The "ozziKs" QCSP Solver

When a quantified
CSP (QCSP) is claimed to be TRUE by some solver, how can we verify that such
answer is correct?

In a
standard CSP, it is just a matter of checking (in polynomial time) the values
assigned to the variables by the solver against each constraint in the CSP.

In the QCSP
framework things are more complex: As a certificate we need a strategy. A
strategy can be seen as a set of functions - one for each existentially
quantified variable - yielding admissible values for existential variables as a
function of some relevant subset of the universally quantified ones.

One such
strategy is what we can actually check against the set of constraints to
certify its validity.

Also, a
strategy is a piece of information which is itself
interesting (provided a "real-world" problem has been encoded into
the underlying QCSP) as it provides an explicit scenario in which the
validity of the quantified set of constraints is revealed.

For the case
of quantified boolean constraints (QBFs), which we
address here, strategies are also called simply certificates.

The software
"ozziKs", whose public availability we publicise here, is the
implementation of an algorithm that: builds a certificate of satisfiability
C(F) - a.k.a. strategy or policy or quantified model - for any given true
Quantified Boolean Formula F for which a suited inference log is available (at
present, only the QBF solver sKizzo produces a suited log); verifies C(F)
against F, thus certifying in a solver-independent way the validity of F;
evaluates user-provided expressions of various kinds over C(F); writes to file
in different formats C(F) and/or the result of the evaluation of the above
mentioned expressions.

A detailed
user manual is available here. Linux, OS-X, and cygwin versions are available
for download at http://sKizzo.info.

"Timetabling and
Rostering" stream at EURO XXII (the 22nd European Conference on
Operational Research), July 8-11, 2007,
Prague,
Czech Republic
. If you would like to present
your work in this stream, please send the title, an abstract of 600 characters,
name and contact information for all co-authors to Dario Landa Silva
<jds@cs.nott.ac.uk> or Hana Rudova <hanka@fi.muni.cz> by 15th
December 2006.

*/Educational Timetabling/* stream at EURO XXII (the
22nd European Conference on Operational Research), July 8-11, 2007,
Prague,
Czech
Republic
. If you would like to present your work in this stream, please send the
title, an abstract of 600 characters, name and contact information for all
co-authors to Sophia Daskalaki <sdask@upatras.gr> not later than
*February 10, 2007*

CADE21, 21st International Conference
on Automated Deduction, July 17-20, 2007 (workshops July 15-16),
International University
Bremen,
Germany
. Submission of title and abstract: February 16, 2007. Submission papers: February 23, 2007. http://www.cadeconference.org/meetings/cade21

Career news

- PhD Studies in Symbolic Computation at RISC-Linz

Symbolic computation is the branch of mathematics and
computer science which solves problems on symbolic objects representable on a
computer. RISC-Linz, the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation of the
Johannes
Kepler
University in
Linz,
Austria
,
is one of the world¡¦s leading institutions for research and education in this
new and promising area.

RISC-Linz invites students for its well established
Ph.D. program in symbolic computation. For excellent applicants we offer
fellowships covering tuition and living expenses.

Applications for studies starting in October should
be received by February 15. For a
description of application details and the RISC curriculum, see the web page

There is an open position for a Product Manager in
the Optimization Product Marketing division at ILOG. The position is centered
around ILOG OPL Development studio which is ILOG's modeling IDE for building
and deploying models and applications based on both Mathematical Programming
(ILOG CPLEX) and Constraints Programming (ILOG CP) technology.

Although listed here as a
US
position, we're open to applicants based in or willing to relocate to Europe,
France
in
particular.

Best regards,

Greger

Greger Ottosson, PhD

Manager, Optimization Product Marketing
gottosson@ilog.com

<mailto:gottosson@ilog.com>

ILOG

1681 Route des Dolines Cell: +33 628 766 758

Les Taissounieres HB2 Office: +33 492 966 206

06560 Valbonne, FRANCE Fax: +33 492 966 162

- Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme

CALL FOR APPLICANTS (2007)

The Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering
and Technology invites applications for research funding under the Government of Ireland\222s
Embark Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme (2007).

The scheme, in its fifth year, will invest a total of
approximately \2004.7 million into the Irish research sector and is open to
researchers from all nations who are at an early stage of their postdoctoral
research career and who wish to further their research in the sciences,
engineering or technology, at an Irish research institution in 2007.

Candidates interested in applying for one of these to
use at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre can contact me:

Gene Freuder

Director,
4C

www.4c.ucc.ie

-Post doc position in
Milan
(
Italy
)

The Department of Electronics and Information at the Politecnico di Milano (
Italy
) is looking for 1 post-doc to
fill an open research position coupled to the project "CAESAR" of the
European Union (http://www.caesar-project.eu).
The area of research would be toxicology modelling in view of the REACH
legislation; in particular integration of in vitro and in silico methods,
structural pattern learning, and data mining of chemical structures.

Applicants
must have at least a Master degree in Science or Engineering (a Ph.D is preferred), and evidence of
significant research accomplishments. The successful applicant will receive a 1
year appointment with possible extensions. Abilities in programming in tools
for scientific data analysis (Matlab, Matematica, R, or other) and knowledge
about Computational Chemistry are a must.

A colloquium
is scheduled for March 12, 2007, and the position will be filled by March 2007.

-Computing
Science Post-Doctoral Positions -
Simon
Fraser
University

Applications
are invited for Post-Doctoral Fellowships supporting work on the MX Project, in
the Computational Logic Laboratory at
Simon
Fraser
University. The goal of
the MX Project is to develop effective techniques for modelling and solving of
search and optimization problems using logic. Further information on the
project can be found athttp://www.cs.sfu.ca/research/groups/mxp/. Between 1 and 3
fellowships will be offered, depending upon final level of funding and
availability of suitable candidates.

Ideal
candidates will have background in logic for computing science, with an
interest in several of:

*finite
model theory and descriptive complexity

*constraint
modelling languages

*Logic and
databases or database query processing

*solvers for
SAT/CSP/SMT/QBF

*combinatorial
optimization and algorithms

*knowledge
representation or theorem proving

The selected
candidate(s) will work closely with the other members of the MX Project team on
fundamental theoretical or applied problems related to the project. Work on the more applied problems may also
involve interaction with our industrial partner.

Positions
will commence as soon as possible after a candidate is chosen. Current project
funding is for one year, with possibility of extension. Funding will depend
upon background, but will be not less than Cdn $42,000, with the possibility
teaching a one-semester course for additional stipend. Some funds will be
available for conference travel.

Simon
Fraser
University is located atop
Burnaby
Mountain
in
Vancouver,
Canada
.
Vancouver thrives as a scenic waterfront city
located just minutes away from the mountains and a wide range of outdoor
activities.
Vancouver's
cultural and intellectual pursuits, leisure opportunities, favourable climate,
and clean and safe environment are consistently cited as quality of life
factors that make it one of the most desirable places in the world to live and
work.